The Witcher 3 cost $81 million to make

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a massive undertaking for CD Projekt Red, a company that started its life localizing bootlegs of Western games before going legit and making their own. Just how massive, though? CEO Adam Kicinski talked about some of the numbers behind the game and its developer at their most recent financial briefing.

The game took approximately 3.5 years to develop, and was created by a team of 240 mostly Polish in-house developers along with about 1,200 more contractors around the world for a total of 1,500. The team localized the game for 15 different languages, with seven of them being fully voiced, employing 500 different voice actors. The launch of the game has 40 different local marketing campaigns.

All of this, says Kicinski, cost 306 million Polish zloty – that’s $81 million U.S. For reference, Rockstar spent about $100 million each on Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV before dwarfing all those with well over $250 million on Grand Theft Auto V, according to Wikipedia. In comparison, $81 million actually sounds pretty efficient.

Over the latest financial period, CD Projekt Red pulled in a net profit of about $62.5 million, selling at least 6 million copies of The Witcher 3, among other things.

These numbers will only improve when The Witcher 3‘s first expansion, Hearts of Stone, hits PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 13.